Paul Montgomery, at 72; reported on riots, Selma march

NEW YORK - Paul L. Montgomery, a former New York Times reporter who covered riots in Harlem, the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, and the search for Che Guevara in Bolivia, died Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was 72 and lived in Lausanne.

The cause was cancer, said his daughter Carrie.

Mr. Montgomery started at the Times as a copy boy in 1959 and went on to an array of reporting assignments, from religion news to the New York Nets in the late 1970s.

From 1966 to 1969, he was the Times's bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro. He roamed Latin America, reporting on the misery of an Ecuadoran slum and the deadly clash between protesters and federal soldiers in Mexico City on Oct. 3, 1968, among other topics.

A year earlier, he had made an arduous journey with Bolivian soldiers through an arid area below the Andes as they searched for Guevara, Fidel Castro's lieutenant in the Cuban revolution.

"The sun rises blazing each morning on the dusty valley, baking the raw earth and the brown brambles," Mr. Montgomery wrote. "The teeming insect life - monstrous flies and mosquitoes, spiders and stinging beetles - swarm in the dead stillness. The heat and the dust and the bites turn the skins of humans to a cloak of misery."

Earlier, while based in New York, and with racial tensions rising across the country, Mr. Montgomery was sent to cover the rioting in Harlem and the growing civil rights movement in the South.

In March 1970, his reporting helped exonerate four Ecuadoran immigrants charged with setting off small incendiary devices inside New York City department stores.

Paul Lauren Montgomery was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Spring Valley, N.Y., as the only child of Paul and Lorraine Montgomery.

He graduated from Columbia University in 1958 and, after editing textbooks for two years, was hired by the Times. He left the Times in 1982 and later reported in Europe for The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Montgomery's first marriage, to Evelyn Lerner, ended in divorce. Besides his daughter Carrie, he leaves his second wife, Jane Morrison; two sons from his first marriage, Jeffrey and John; and another daughter, Alice.